Smith packs an immense amount into that trailed off sentence: All the things you can't say, all the things you don't dare say. With "If The Blizzard's in Me," the first track off her new album, "And Yet, So What," Smith paints a heartbreaking portrait of depression: Even the simplest things become Herculean tasks. She dreams about getting up for another cup of coffee, but can't. She can't do her own laundry.

"I was frozen for a long time," she sings, "standing in the same spot next to the door that might as well have been locked."

"And Yet, So What" is already available on Bandcamp, and there will be a release party July 12 at a house concert series in Quincy. Smith will also appear as part of the July 19 Sleepover Fest house concert at Negi Negi in Worcester.

She's a remarkable songwriter, and proves it by pulling off a pretty nifty trick: Everything on this album is in stasis, paralyzed by loss, by depression, by the aftermath of bad decisions. The entire album is set amid aftermaths, and forward movement is less an action than it is a prayer.

"I should've let myself get held down," she sings, on "D.I.Y.," "when I was too young to know/ what was good for myself,/ then it's sad 'cause I can still hear my own voice/ trying to make the right decision/ and it's scary because/I could've [expletive] everything up for this."

We don't find out the particulars of the persona's actions, and we really don't need to. Staring at the repercussions of selfishness with vivid hindsight is a common and easily understood phenomenon: That moment when you realize that getting what you wanted wasn't worth the damage it brought, wasn't worth the taste it left in your mouth.

"And the taste in my mouth is a stale cigarette," she sings, in "Chainsmoker." "Does that make any sense? when I'm at odds and ends?"

The music is spare, and frankly, it doesn't need to be anything else. Just a Billy Bragg-style strum of acoustic guitar. And yet, somehow, the song is devastating.

Both "Blizzard" and "D.I.Y." find their personas on the precipice of moving forward, but "Chainsmoker" leaves momentum in someone else's hands entirely:

"Maybe I don't have the guts/to ask you straight up for your heart/but I'm sort of a mess over you, babe/so it hurts when I'm a smoke in a chain."

The spare music and low-fi recording lend the album a sense of alienation and distance. It makes everything sound a little brittle, and in this case, that's a good thing: It balances the thick smokiness of Smith's own voice, and its plaintive sense of disintegration:

"If only I had felt it myself then," she sings in "Overheard Lines," "then maybe I would know/why I stand here undone, in motion/and I'm screwed up,/lost connection sometimes/my heart can't find back home."

A desire to leave and a desire to return home become the polarities that drive the album, the twin gravitational forces that arrest everything into immobility. Both come into play in a lovely cover of local songwriter Greg McKillop's "Satellite," and finally, on an adaptation of John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads."

Reworking Denver's lyrics, she sings of "living alone, but fearless" and decries her own brave face as a lie.